“What is feminine embodiment, Sarah?”

This is not the kind of question you expect when you are about to gift the world with a beautiful new body of wisdom on this very topic, but it is so timely as we women rise up together to face what we have to face collectively. And so, I relish the chance to share why feminine embodiment matters, not just to women but to all of us.

I took the question for a walk…

Walking Wisdom.

These exact words— ‘feminine embodiment’ —are thrown around a lot these days, and we tend to let them slide over our consciousness superficially. The paradox is that we toss them out and listen to them disembodiedly!

What does it mean to be embodied? What does it really mean to be embodied in our feminine? I learned through the very fact of being a woman until life called me in quest of the deeper meaning.

In this world and society, we are taught to live more in our heads and trust our logical, rational brains. We are taught to be externally focused, to be people-pleasers, and to have external goals, and consequently, we do not quite know how to relate to or trust our bodies.

That’s just how I lived for many years. I excelled as a student, majoring in Economics. I looked outside myself and did what was expected of me.

But something didn’t quite feel right; something wasn’t quite working. It was subtle at first, but then, at 25 years old, my parents got divorced. My world fell apart. I fell apart. I couldn’t put myself back together to who I was before.

I opened to alternative spiritual realities and, in turn, opened up to more deeply questioning reality and the dominant paradigm of eating healthy, organic foods. Becoming a vegetarian. Doing yoga. Reading Edgar Casey and Shirley MacLaine. Leaving my “career” job in Cincinnati to work at a yoga retreat center in Montana. Getting married and moving to Boulder, Colorado, the mecca of alternative spirituality and holistic health. I kept exploring things spiritually, but also, still looking outside of myself for the right way to do things, the right way to be “spiritual”.

Then, I became pregnant with the first of my four children. I chose to give birth at home to all four children, trusting in my body and myself and having midwives at my side, women who believed, as I do, that we women know how to give birth. Somehow, even then, I knew we had done this for as long as humans have been on this planet.

During my first birth, I still remember the distinct moment when I looked over the candles burning in the corner, given to me by the women who had attended my Blessing Way the day before. Each had offered me a blessing as they planted the lit candle in the bowl of Earth. 

Now, looking over to all the candles now lit again to support me in my labor, I connected and tapped into a field of feminine power and force that came into my body and gave me a sudden bolt of confidence and power that I now knew I could give birth, that I would give me birth – like the billions of women before me and like the billions of women after me.

My body opened to allow my baby to come through, a canal that had never opened up that big before but, at the same time, was innately designed to do so.

I knew in every cell and fiber of my being that we, as women, as the embodiment of the feminine, are designed to receive the spark of life, to be pregnant, to create, to gestate, to cultivate, and to labor and to birth. We birth our human children. We birth our creative projects. We birth new worlds. We are made to create and birth.

Immediately after birthing my son, I haemorrhaged. I lost blood. All that energy I had received from the feminine energy field and the empowering process of birthing my baby leaked out of my body. It drained out of me. I was left feeling depleted and drained.

What just happened? How did that happen? Why?

Over the next few years, I explored my haemorrhaging on every level, inwardly and externally, physically and psychically.  I wanted to understand, heal, and never have this happen again. I learned that this is a pattern in my maternal line – my mother haemorrhaged, my grandmother haemorrhaged, and on and on as soon as the baby was born.

Despite my “working” on it, I haemorrhaged with each of my three following births. After I powerfully birthed my daughter, I haemorrhaged again, this time losing even more blood, and my blood pressure went down to 50 over 0.

I went on to give birth to two more children, each time receiving medication after the birth to prevent the haemorrhaging. Yet still, I haemorrhaged. With my second son, I lost energy but no blood. With my second daughter, I lost blood but no energy.

I could not hold and contain the powerful feminine energies from birthing in my body.

I was like a sieve. A leaky vessel.

Add to this that I also developed a diastasis in my front muscles, a split down the recti abdominal muscles from above my belly button down to my lower belly. I first experienced this when I was 7 months pregnant with my first child – a searing pain that tore into my muscles as I turned over in bed one night. The split became worse with each pregnancy, not only with the stretching out of my already stretched belly muscles but also with my babies getting larger with each pregnancy – my 3rd child was 9lbs, 8 oz, and my 4th was 9lbs, 10oz. Not small babies!

Pregnant or not, I now had a split down the middle of my front. I could put three fingers wide into it and insert them down to the second knuckle. It was big and wide and deep. And I had a big belly, pregnant or not. 

I was literally split open.

This split was profoundly physical but also energetic. I knew it was an expression of a deep split in me, my body, and my being that had existed within me long before the manifestation of the physical split.

Yet I couldn’t – didn’t – fully appreciate the depth of the split within me until I unexpectedly experienced a sexual awakening that surprised and shocked me and shook me and my life to its core. 

This awakening activated me on so many levels of my being and body that I didn’t even know existed beforehand. In turn, I became painfully and viscerally aware of the profound split within me – between myself and my sexuality. Between my mind and my body. Between my heart and my belly. Between my intellect and my intuition. 

Within and without.

Three years later, I walked the Camino de Santiago to celebrate my 50th birthday. To heal the split.

I returned to Europe and, after the Camino, to the UK.  Being in England again for the first time in 27 years, I became profoundly aware of the split between my English heritage and being an American citizen. 

I was born in England and disconnected from my homeland, split from my connection and roots with a place and, in turn, with the Earth and my body. With the feminine. 

It became my mission, focus, and desire to heal the split.

I walked and walked and walked. I returned to the Camino. I walked the “pilgrimage of initiation” of the Celtic Camino in Spain and France. I was called off that path and called over to the UK to walk the Mary Michael Pilgrims Way through the land of my ancestors, both my father’s in Cornwall and my mother’s in and around Somerset.

I desperately wanted to walk this pilgrimage path across these lands, to weave together my belonging here, in the soil of my motherland. Still, instead, I was called off the path again and brought back again and again to these initial miles in southwestern Cornwall. Like a magnet, these paths, with their ancient sacred sites, became a spiral path that pulled me here, holding me in this vortex, bringing me back to walk the same paths to the same sacred sites year after year after year.

In this spiral journey of “walking deeply”, these sacred sites showed me an ancient feminine wisdom of a map of this landscape, revealing a template that holds and mirrors the sacred feminine portals of a woman’s body. Specific sites are the mirrors, reflections, expressions of the feminine anatomy, and portals that give us access to the feminine field of wisdom, mystery, and power.

They are gates into the beyond, a field of feminine energy that we can access in our own bodies. After walking these spiral paths and visiting these sacred sites every year for seven years, I was given a map of these sacred portals of the feminine body and shown how I could access this feminine field of energy in my body, my being within me, anytime I desired or chose.

Yet somehow, even with this marvellous discovery, what I was aware of remained a concept, an amazing idea that I “got” intuitively and instinctively but still didn’t feel or know in my body.

I could see the map. I knew it, but I still couldn’t feel it. I knew there had to be another layer or level of connecting with myself and my body, and these sites act as gateways into my soul.

Several years later, I was guided to the extraordinary body of work known as the Venus Portals, developed by my mentor, Katherine Zorensky.

 For the next two years, I have been diligently on an inner journey to become deeply intimate with the Venus Portals in my body. To feel them.

I am now trained to teach the Portals and have incorporated wisdom into my own evolving body of work to create and incorporate the Spiral Portals and the Spiral Portal Path. 

After my two-year journey with the Venus Portals and the practices to open and activate them, I am now connected in body with my essence, my feminine soul, my eternal being, with access immediately available in, through, and with my feminine portals.

With each portals practice, I have felt as though I am weaving a healing ribbon in and around the warp of the portals in my human body.

Over time, this weaving has created a cohesive container that, instead of being porous like a sieve, has become a cohered chalice, a bowl. This vase holds and contains the energies I receive from my desires, pleasures, and experiences.

I now experience a rootedness in my body with my Self, my Soul, and my Source that gives me the capacity to deepen in Love and even more to birth beauty into the world.

Yes, it is my tagline and my true and authentic visceral experience, which is no longer just a concept. Now, it simply is.

I simply am. In body. Embodied.

Still…the question remains.

What does it mean to be embodied?

What does feminine embodiment mean?

What will it mean for and to YOU?

Firstly, it means that we have a potent connection to our sexual anatomy. We’re not afraid of it. We’re not only willing to touch it but also to receive, to create, to be in, to be with soul pleasure in body.

We are willing to desire. We are willing and able to experience pleasure in our bodies and open to expanding and deepening into this experience in our bodies. Even more, we can receive, hold, and be a container for it.

We no longer have to haemorrhage the pleasure and the power out of our bodies. It gets to seep into and become integrated into every cell of our being, weaving ever more deeply this integration of soul and body into the fabric of our being.

We also get to trust our bodies. We get to trust when our Yoni lips swell with a ‘yes’. We get to trust when the heat rises within us, and our clitoris says ‘no’ with a fiery discernment. We get to immerse ourselves in the deep well within, touch the waters of our feelings and emotions and hold ourselves tenderly and lovingly as we feel all that is within us to feel and experience.

We get to go through those tight places in our lives, knowing we are held.  We get to go even deeper into the core of our being, where we are squeezed so tight that we would have run away before. 

We know we can surrender to the tightness and stay with ourselves. In turn, we open into and access the infinite beyond, in which we are primordially connected with the Great Mother at the center of the universe.

We get to choose to open and/or close the gates.

(I was just asked to close the gate by a man walking ahead of me. He looked back to ensure I would close the gate after I went through. “I will close the gate,” I said. Synchronicity?)

Through connection and embodiment with our human bodies and feminine wombs, we have access to the Cosmic Womb of the Great Mother, the Source of all Life. We also have access to Earth and the Womb of Gaia, in our bellies and under our feet.

With embodiment, we can root into the ground without and within, where we can stand strong, create safety from within and hold a space for ourselves to be accountable to ourselves, loving ourselves as we feel feelings we haven’t been able to feel before and be present in situations we haven’t been able to stay in.

With embodiment, we can hold ourselves and stay with ourselves, no matter what arises within us or what happens outside of us.

Being embodied means that when we receive an infusion of energy, we can receive it and hold it. We have become a cohesive container to receive the energies to cultivate, generate, birth, and bring forth beauty. With embodiment, we have ourselves enough to remember our sacred dreams, why we’re here, our soul path, and our soul desires, and we can deeply receive them rather than reject, deny, ignore, or push them away. Embodied, we can receive these desires, create them, and birth them into the world.

We are the cohesive container that holds this energy with the choice to use it wisely. We no longer need to haemorrhage it out, leak it out, give it away, diffuse it, or water it down. We can use our power for the greatest good.  We can also use it to destroy. We are fully capable of that, but the more embodied we are, the more we are aware and conscious and use this energy to create beauty in the world.

Being embodied in the feminine, we have access to a sacred courage to live true to who we are, true to why we’re here, and true to honor the imperative of our soul’s path.

Being fully embodied, we can be intimate with ourselves and with another. We can fully be ourselves in a relationship with our beloved masculine and, in turn, fully receive him in such deep Love without needing to belittle him, put him down, or be afraid of him.

Embodied, we stand in our sacred ground. We are so rooted and so connected that we hold ourselves and our divine masculine with such deep reference, respect and Love, knowing that we are meeting each other in our wholeness, holding each of us to the greatest, highest, most profound versions of ourselves.

Being embodied, we honor and respect our capacity to transform the world, birth new worlds, birth souls, and create and bring forth transformation. We are responsible. We become responsible beings who respect our power’s depth and passion. In becoming embodied, we become the co-creator god/goddesses we are designed to be.

We become the embodiment of the Sacred Beyond. We can hold the paradox in our bodies – the both/and, matter/spirit, heart/womb, heart/head, light/dark. We have the capacity to hold and be with it all. 

It is no small feat to become an embodied woman. 

t requires responsibility, awareness, and courage. 

It demands a willingness to surrender to life and Love and to open yourself to the unknown. 

You get to surrender that security and safety created outside of yourself and cultivate an inner security and safety sourced deep within. 

It requires us to be willing to give up our sense of independence and that we can do it all by ourselves. 

We are no longer separate from spirit or from Source. We are no longer untethered beings. No longer are we out there doing whatever we want to do.

Now, we are here in service of Love. We are here to embody Love and bring more Love.

Here we are.

Here we are. 

Here we are.